Marketing and marketing ops: coming together like never before

In a MarTech Live episode broadcast on the final day of the MarTech conference, we asked Chris Penn whether he saw the operational side of marketing aligning more closely with the campaign/creative side, simply because marketing ops and the marketing stack create opportunities (and place constraints) on what the marketing team can do.

Penn is co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at TrustInsights.ai, and this was his reaction: “Absolutely it’s a real thing. The thing we always say when it comes to data, is that data without decisions is just a distraction. Data is your ingredients. What’s the point of buying more and more ingredients from the store if you never cook anything? We’ve bought 500 lbs of flour, perhaps we should try baking something with it. So you can see the logical progression: after operations comes deployment, is monetization.”

Watch all 2020 episodes of MarTech Live here.

A connected flow. Big data to big ops to big deployment (e.g. in campaigns) is Penn’s mantra. What’s critical is that this be a connected flow. Marketers planning campaigns in a silo, without consultation and collaboration with marketing ops, seems a recipe for disaster.

“It’s going to be very interesting,” said Penn, “because the operations side is going to be very intermingled with artificial intelligence, with the ability for machinery to do stuff at vast scales, like deploying a million advertisements all at once. That level of big marketing ops is where everyone will probably end up going to some degree — except for the small business folks who don’t need that scale.”

Why we care. If, as we believe, marketing is martech, marketing ops will increasingly be placed at the core of successful marketing teams, especially as emphasis is increasingly placed, by B2B as well as B2C, on digital marketing. It could well be the story of 2021.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.